by John Everson
He leaned down to kiss her, and Rae felt her sex grow instantly wet as his cool tongue snaked in her mouth.
Kharon took one of her nipples in his fingers and twisted it until she gave an unconscious moan. Then he pulled away and pointed to the ceiling. “They need you now,” he said. “Give them what they need. When you are ready, we’ll be waiting for you at the end of The Red.”
He turned and walked out of the room then, leaving Rae turned on beneath the leering faces.
She felt her face flush with heat from Kharon’s touch, and she mimicked his abuse of her breast.
Presently, she showed the ghostly voyeurs what they wanted to see.
Chapter Forty-Nine
NightWhere
“Turn here,” Selena said softly. She pointed at an old farmhouse surrounded by a stand of maples and pines. They’d been driving for almost forty-five minutes to get clear of the suburbs. The highway had gone from four lanes to two after they’d passed Wheaton, and traffic went from scarce to nonexistent when they’d pulled down a potholed farm lane. The landscape now consisted of long rolling hills bordered by scrub trees and fences to keep the livestock in.
Mark pulled the Sonata into a gravel driveway. At least three dozen cars and SUVs were parked in the grass near an old barn behind the house. “Just follow the crowd,” Selena said.
Mark pulled around a row of vehicles and parked near the driveway. Easy exit, he thought.
When he turned off the key, Selena grabbed his arm. “Please don’t do this,” she said. “I’m begging you not to go. I can give you what you need.” One bloodred tear trailed down her cheek.
Mark took a deep breath and, with his finger, wiped the trail away. “I have to do this,” he said. “You know I do.”
“I can’t help you anymore once you go inside.”
“I know,” he said. “Stay here? And stay out of sight.”
He kissed her once again, tasting the despair on her lips. Earlier, after they’d left the pawnshop and found a secluded forest preserve to park in, she’d tasted urgent, wanting, demanding. Now her lips tasted bitter, defeated.
The door on the front of the barn opened, letting light escape briefly into the night. A half-dozen people came walking out together, and the door shut behind them. But Mark could see the shadows bobbing across the gravel. They were headed towards Mark’s car.
Jesus, could they be onto him already?
Mark’s stomach froze. He slipped lower in his seat, and he motioned for Selena to do the same.
And then just as quickly, he relaxed. The group dispersed as soon as they reached the rows of cars.
“The night is winding down,” Selena said. “They’ll all begin filing away soon. First the newbies, then the regulars. And then the inner circle will finish their rituals and the last of the visitors will leave for the night. Just as we should.”
Mark nodded. “I need to hurry.”
He eased the car door open and stepped out. The early morning air was cool and moist-heavy with fog and dew-pregnant with the coming day. He drew it into his lungs in a long, deep breath as he patted the knife in his back pocket and the pistol in his front.
It might be the last time he tasted the predawn air.
Selena sat like a statue in the front seat of the car. She would not look at him as he closed the door. Mark shrugged and turned towards the barn. He got it. Selena thought she’d had him “hooked” and here he was risking his life for another woman. A woman Selena probably thought of as a worthless, evil slut.
But Mark had allowed Rae to be caught up in the allure of NightWhere. It seemed like a cult to him, in the end. And the only way to save someone from the brainwashing of a cult was to sever all connection to it. You had to force them away from the people who were playing with their heads.
If Kharon and the Watchers were all demons…then Mark had to believe they were using some kind of spell over Rae. The woman he loved and had lived with for years would never have considered using him as a sacrifice before.
He bent low and crept softly through the rows of cars. He didn’t want to be noticed by any hidden sentries before he was at the door. He’d have to move really fast then; he didn’t need them to be tipped off any sooner.
Mark stepped past the impromptu parking lot and began to follow the barn wall to the main door the crowd had just exited.
A cool hand grabbed him by the wrist.
“Mark, wait.” Selena whispered. She pulled on his arm until he backtracked around the corner of the barn. “I know a better way,” she said. “You can’t just walk in the front door waving a gun around. They’ll take you down before you ever leave the Blue Room.”
“I’ve never seen another entrance,” he whispered.
“There is. There’s a door to the Field of Flesh,” she said. “If you walk through there, you’ll come out in the hallway that leads down through the center of The Red. Once you pass the whipping rooms and the rooms of mutilation, atrocity and desecration, you’ll arrive at the final room before The Black. You can’t go anywhere but through, or back. That room is where you were last night, and it’s where Rae will be tonight. It’s used for the rite-of-passage room to The Black.”
Mark nodded. “Sounds much better than forcing through the front door.”
“Just remember,” she warned. “Do not listen to anything you hear in the field. Like everything in NightWhere, it’s a poisonous place. It will play on all of your fears. It will twist whatever love you have into hate and try to turn what you hate into love.”
“Ears closed,” he said.
She led him to a small side door in the barn. “I can’t go inside,” she said. “They’d be on me in a heartbeat.”
Mark nodded. “Thanks for getting me this far.”
She leaned in to kiss him. “Please don’t let them catch you,” she said. “I gave up too much for you to die now.”
“I won’t,” he promised.
He eased the door open, but still it squealed in the quiet of night. Just as he slipped inside, Selena said one more thing.
“Mark, I love you. I always have.”
Chapter Fifty
Gordon
Kharon had promised him a new chance. Gordon had been furious when his rabbit had lost the race. He knew that there was some kind of status won there, and certainly Rae’s star had risen quickly in NightWhere after that night. Meanwhile, the Watchers’ interest in Gordon and Amelia, who had vied for the position of top degrader/degradee, seemed to have waned.
Amelia had since disappeared altogether. But Gordon had asked Kharon for another chance to prove himself. He’d been assigned the role of guard to Mark, ushering the man through the room of fire.
Kharon had seemed pleased and afterwards had shown Gordon to a private bedroom. “You may stay here for as long as you are able,” the lead Watcher had said.
Gordon had nodded and tossed his overnight bag on the bed. He had hoped for this. It was the first time he’d been invited to stay over in NightWhere, but he’d come tonight with the hope (and preparation) that he would finally join the inner circle. He knew it was either join or die trying, because the body in his basement wasn’t going to stay secret forever. Even if he transported it out of there, he was no dummy. Every genius murderer in the world hid the body someplace smart, and they always seemed to rise to the surface and get themselves found, fingering the killer with some kind of evidence in the process.
No, Gordon needed to disappear himself. And he couldn’t think of anyplace better to do it than in NightWhere. He could dedicate himself to pain here. He could offer people the kink they desired, and satisfy his own lusts in the process.
He liked it here and wanted with all his heart to call it home. Now, apparently, he could.
Gordon had felt victorious that first night. But on the second night, he was less sure. He got up the next day-actually the next night-and walked out of his room and down the hall into the thick of NightWhere. He’d tried to play as he normally did, but he
found himself looking sidelong to see if any of the Watchers were paying attention to him. Wasn’t he one of them now? Shouldn’t they know?
On the night after he’d herded Mark into the fire pit, he didn’t see Kharon at all after the group dispersed from the fire pit cavern. Didn’t see any of the usual Watchers back in the Blue Room actually, except Sin-D. He flogged some people in the Blue Room and then disappeared into a sadism room in The Red. He’d found himself some empty kicks and then had walked back to his room alone. He didn’t feel like part of the in-crowd.
The same thing happened the following night.
He’d been taken in, but also summarily dropped. What the hell?
Today, he’d awoken to find Kharon at the foot of his bed. “You’ve had time to get acclimated and understand what we really are,” the Watcher said. “Tonight I have something for you to do.”
Gordon grinned, considering a number of ways in which he might draw blood. At last, Kharon was going to let him be part of the Watchers’ circle. “Just tell me what I have to do,” he said.
“Nothing right now. Wait for me in the Blue Room, and I’ll come for you later.”
Gordon hung out with Sin-D at the bar for a couple hours, until Kharon appeared. “We’re ready for you now,” the Watcher said. Gordon slid from his bar stool but Kharon put out a hand.
“Finish your drink,” he said. “There’s no rush.”
Gordon did as he said…sort of. He really chugged the last of his beer and then nodded. “Let’s have some fun,” he said. After the past couple days he was anxious to really put the pain on someone. Now that he was a permanent resident of NightWhere, he knew that he could take things farther than he ever had before. Stewarding Mark to the fire pit had opened his eyes. There was more here than met the eye. He knew that this place was more than off the map. It was off the earth, in some sense.
Gordon knew that he was serving demons.
He didn’t care. He loved the work. And wanted more.
He followed Kharon through the medieval door and into the murky corridors of The Red. They walked together down the long corridor, passing rooms of torture and perverted pleasure.
“Have you enjoyed your stay so far?” Kharon asked.
Gordon nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “Staying here full time is a dream come true.”
“Especially when your wife is buried in the sand of your basement,” Kharon said coolly. “I’d guess you don’t want to stay home too much longer.”
Gordon paled. “What do you…”
“Don’t act surprised,” Kharon said. “You know what we are. Of course I know what you did. Why do you think I let you stay here full time?”
Gordon looked at the ghoulish man and gave a nervous smile. “So…she was like my ticket in?”
“You could say that,” Kharon smiled.
They arrived at the door at the end of the hallway that wound through The Red, and Kharon motioned for Gordon to step inside.
Gordon did.
Hands grabbed him by the wrists and waist and legs as soon as he entered the room. Gordon tried to bring his big beefy fists up to knock them away, but instead metal bands clicked across his wrists. He felt the cold iron before he saw it. Black robes were all around him, like a flock of human-shaped vultures.
Chains clinked when he lifted his foot and he realized that leg irons had also been slapped around his ankles. Gordon stopped struggling and instead looked around the room, trying to get a read on what was going on. He knew it wasn’t good.
Kharon walked before Gordon, while the Watchers held his chains. The ghoulish man didn’t say a word. Instead, he reached around Gordon’s neck and fastened a rusty metal collar, before stepping back and pulling on the chain, urging Gordon to follow him.
Kharon led him to a stone table in the middle of the room. Then he handed the lead chain to Rae, who stood nude at the head of the table. Gordon saw that she’d been scarred with the sign of NightWhere; the seductive snake twined around her belly button before eating its own tail just above her crotch.
Another woman stood just behind her, someone Gordon had never seen before. Her skin was black as pitch, but also decorated with the snake. Dozens and dozens of iterations of the snake. She too was naked, but instead of being aroused at her exotic body, Gordon felt his sex wither and retreat.
He was not going to be doling out any beatings today. These women had something else in mind. And he knew it was not going to be good.
Not for him, anyway. Not good at all.
Chapter Fifty-One
Field of Flesh
The door closed and Mark was alone in NightWhere. All hints of the old wooden barn vanished with the closing of the door…he stood in a cool, dark room that seemed old, but in a classical crypt way, not of the farm. The floor was stone, not wood, and on the far end he could see the orange flicker of flame from a wall sconce. He walked towards the light, his steps echoing faintly.
The room seemed extraordinarily quiet. But as he walked across its length he began to hear something in the distance. It was almost like the moan of the wind through a faraway attic, or the whisper of a conversation behind closed doors. Mark guessed it was the sound of NightWhere, somewhere ahead beyond the walls.
But as he reached the wall the sconce was on and followed it a few yards, it abruptly turned. He followed it to the left and saw more sconces guttering with low flames. He stood in a small hallway that opened to a vast room. There were trees inside, he thought, or corn stalks. Something repetitive and vertical. He could just make out rows and rows of something, reaching up from the floor and disappearing into shadow.
He stepped into the room and the susurration grew. Then he understood where it came from. The stalks stretched out ahead of him like a cornfield-only, the field wasn’t growing corn.
It grew bodies. He would have said corpses, from the looks of most of them. They were all stripped and standing. He couldn’t see what held them upright, but he assumed they were all tied to posts or something. Many were missing limbs, and all visibly bled from numerous gashes and cuts. Their skin was greyish and drawn, as if they’d been dead and hanging for days. Mark stared at one man whose empty eye socket cried crimson. He was sure from the wound and the man’s limp limbs that the man was a corpse. But then, the head tilted slightly, moving to stare with its one good eye at Mark. The lips opened slowly and whispered just one word:
“Run.”
Mark instinctively looked behind him at the warning, but there was nothing there but darkness.
The whispers grew as he stood there. He heard other faint warnings like “Run” and “Go” but also the occasional plea, “Help me, please,” or worse, “Kill me.”
Mark stared and the bodies stretched to his left and right for as far as his eyes could see. It was truly a field of flesh.
“Are you the harvest or the harvester?” a voice growled from his left.
“I’m only passing through,” Mark answered. The whispers suddenly turned to laughter.
“Nobody passes through,” a woman in the front row said. Her head hung at a broken angle, and blood streamed from a long gash in her belly. Mark saw the glisten of intestine through the gash and forced himself to look away.
“I’m going to NightWhere,” he said. “I’ve been there before.”
“You’re in NightWhere,” someone said with a laugh that ended in a scream of sudden pain.
“The real NightWhere,” another voice continued. “This is the field that feeds the evil. We bleed for you.”
Mark noticed then that there were gutters in the stone floor on either side of each row of bodies. He stepped closer. The troughs were about six inches deep and maybe three inches wide. At the front of the human garden, he could see the grey of the stone at the bottom of the gutters. But by the third body down the line, the bottom stone was obscured by the dark flow of crimson that rained down the chests and thighs and feet of each ravaged body. From some, the flow was thick, especially from those missing wh
ole limbs, but lacking any tourniquets or bandages to staunch the blood.
From others who simply were cut, the blood flowed slower…but all contributed some flow of pain to the drains that leached their lives away. Mark guessed that this was the reservoir that fed the steady stream of crimson down the walls in The Red.
“We bleed for you,” several of the bodies echoed. The whisper of that phrase spread across the Field of Flesh like a slow wind, and soon Mark could hear hundreds of echoes.
“Not for me,” he said. “I don’t want your blood.”
“Then you will join us,” an old woman in the second row said. She had raw circles of meat where her breasts had once been, and her belly had been flayed open. The skin hung in wrinkled flaps and clung wetly to her thighs.
Mark shook his head and decided to waste no more time. He stepped forward, walking with tentative strides between the rows of bodies. He was careful not to step in the troughs, but he couldn’t help but walk through the crimson on the path. It was covered in blood that was slowly, steadily draining across it into the gutters. The whispers grew in volume as he passed-voices calling out in laughter and pain alike, “We bleed for you.”
Hands grasped at him as he passed, but most seemed to barely have the strength to move, and he brushed them off easily.
Mark began counting the rows, but after he had reached fifty-seven and still couldn’t see the end, he gave up. There were thousands of people in this room; now that he was in the middle of the field, he couldn’t see anything but bloody, staked-up bodies in every direction. Most of them didn’t move as he passed. Those were the best ones. It was the ones who had intestines trailing out of their midsections, or who had eyeballs hanging from strings of gore across their cheeks, that really freaked him out when they moved slightly and reached for him.
The pleas of “kill me” grew more frequent as he walked.
Soon the fear that he would never reach the other side began to gnaw at him. He’d been walking for ten minutes, and still he saw no end to the path. The rows seemed to stretch on forever as the bloodied fingers grasped at his shirt, staining his clothes with their pain as he passed.